


Rebuilding

by AceofHarts



Series: Homeostasis [1]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Elementary School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-16
Updated: 2014-03-16
Packaged: 2018-01-15 22:13:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1321126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceofHarts/pseuds/AceofHarts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elementary-school-age Armin tries to come to terms with the fact that his parents aren't coming home, while Eren and Mikasa sort out the best way to be around him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rebuilding

            The skin around his grandfather’s eyes was even more wrinkled than normal; it was lined and frail and grey—frighteningly transparent, now that Armin focused on it. The only reason he was looking in the first place was because he did not want to see the man’s eyes themselves; if they were transparent too, if they showed what was behind them like the skin showed the veins, then Armin was not going to know what to do.

            “Oh.” It was all he could think of for several seconds, so he nodded. “Okay.” His hands—small, whiter now than normal—curled around the book he’d been reading when his grandfather had called him down to the kitchen. “Can I go back to my room?” The sunlight here was too bright and too yellow and too hot. It was glaring at Armin off the pots and pans, even off of the dull wooden floor.

            His grandfather’s eyes wrinkled further still; a line appeared, just for a moment, between his eyebrows. Then he put a large, warm hand on top of Armin’s head and said, “I’ll call you when dinner’s ready,” and let him go.

            Their house was not large. It had two bedrooms, and Armin’s grandfather slept in a chair in the main room since it was easier on his back—but really, Armin knew it was so that he himself could have his own bedroom. Their house was not large, but it took Armin forever to reach the second floor. He noticed now something he hadn’t on his way downstairs; his grandfather had closed the door to his parents’ room. He must have done that earlier—he must have known for hours.

            There was a pain at the centre of his chest, just where his ribs met. He could still feel the press of his mother’s hand there when she’d told him the anatomical name. She’d always been quizzing him, tapping on a knuckle or a bone in his arm and asking him what it was called. Armin pressed his palm to his chest, mumbled, “Sternum,” and wondered whether the bone was scientifically prone to disintegrating.

            Armin crawled onto his bed and pulled the blankets up around him in a soft nest. He propped his book open on his knees, turned it to the page he’d left off at, bent his head down, and watched the droplets blur the ink.

 

            Eren knocked on the door at the same time he did every school day, which was to say, about five minutes later than he really should have. His mother was always sighing that fourth-graders should not already be sleeping in like this, and that she could only imagine his attendance record once he reached high school. Mikasa, standing stilted now to Eren’s left, had been tasked with ensuring Eren’s pace was quick enough to make up for his slow start. It was a job she took with grim seriousness.

            The door of Armin’s house opened, but it did not reveal a short blond-haired boy, armed with his backpack and a pair of bright eyes, ready to absorb another school day. It was, rather, his grandfather, bearded and kindly and today strangely faded and rumpled about the brow.

            Mikasa’s reaction should have told Eren before Armin’s grandfather spoke the words. She tensed up, moved her feet a little closer together, brushed one hand against her opposite arm. Eren just blinked up at the old man.

            “Is Armin home?”

            “He won’t be going to school today.”

            “Why not?”

            “Eren,” Mikasa said; she pulled on his sleeve.

            “His parents passed away,” Armin’s grandfather said. Mikasa thought she could hear Eren’s mind ticking as this processed. She was never certain how he would respond to much of anything. It did not make her nervous, but it made her wary. She was leaning her weight now on the front of her feet in case she had to move, to pull him back. She hadn’t been with Eren’s family long, but she’d already learned that his general approach to Armin’s troubles was to find some antagonistic face to punch.

            “So let us see him,” Eren said.

            “I’m letting him have some time to himself.”

            “I’m his friend. I want to see him.”

            The man sighed a little—not a frustrated sound or an exasperated one, but some ambivalent, gentle gesture.

            “I’ll tell him that,” he said. “I’m sure he’ll appreciate it. But I think right now Armin needs some time alone. I’ll make sure he knows you came by.”

            When Eren just stood there, scowling, and showed every indication that he intended to become a permanent glowering fixture on the doorstep, Mikasa took him firmly by the wrist and dragged him away. It was her job to get Eren to school on time, and anyway she did not know—she couldn’t be sure, as she didn’t know Armin as well as Eren did, but his grandfather did. And he said Armin needed to be alone. It was the opposite of what Mikasa had wanted after her parents had been killed, but she felt that if it was what Armin needed, it was what he should get, even if it wasn’t what Eren wanted.

            She tucked her chin into her scarf as she marched; Eren was tugging his arm in a vain attempt to pull free of her.

“I just want to see him,” he was muttering. Mikasa didn’t slow down.

She hoped they were going to be okay.

 

            Armin wasn’t supposed to go into his parents’ room. His grandfather hadn’t stated that, but the closed door was an obvious sign enough, even to a nine-year-old. Normally he would have respected this on principle; but what he needed was in there. So, around sunset, while his grandfather was busy making dinner, Armin crept across the hall and into the room that still smelled like his parents. There were clothes strewn haphazardly on the bed, indented where the suitcases had been placed on top of them. There were files, too, work-papers, things Armin didn’t care about. On the dresser his mother’s pink toothbrush lay neglected on its side. He wondered whether they’d gotten where they were going, and whether she’d had time to buy a replacement. Nobody had told him what had happened.

            But he wasn’t here to linger over half-finished tasks. Against the far wall of the room leaned a bookshelf, always sagging in the middle under the weight of its collection. They were such pretty books, thick and old and leather-bound, books from when their owners had been in university. Armin didn’t know what they were about—he couldn’t even read most of the titles—but he pulled down the ones in the nicest, deepest colours, stacked them in his too-skinny arms, and marched back to his room with them. The night before, when he’d been lying in his fortress of blankets and staring torpidly at the wall, he’d decided that he was going to read his parents’ books. All of them. He was going to learn what their jobs had been and why they’d been so excited about them that they’d needed to leave him and his grandfather in the first place. Never had he doubted that his parents loved him, but if there was something they’d loved enough to leave him for, he wanted to know what it was; he wanted to love it too.

            He was in the doorway to his room when he heard something he’d had no reason to expect. It wasn’t at all a strange or an unfamiliar noise—he heard it most days—but he’d forgotten the cadence of it over just the past twenty four hours. The voices were tinny through the glass of his window, and he couldn’t see the faces of the people they belonged to, but they were unmistakeable all the same.

            “Eren—”

            “I know! I’m not going to fall—almost—there—”

            Armin froze with his eyes fixed on the square of his bedroom window until two familiar faces appeared in it. Armin dropped to the floor on some inexplicable impulse so that he was hidden behind his dresser.

            “Hey, Armin!” It sounded as if Eren was trying to shout and whisper at the same time. “Armin! Are you there? Mikasa, do you see him?”

            “No…Eren, we should go home.”

            There was silence. Just as Armin was starting to think Eren had listened to his friend, just as Armin was peering out beyond the corner of the dresser, there was a loud belligerent rap at the window.

            “ _Armi_ —”

            He started back, clutching his books. Silence again. Wondering about the possibility that Eren and Mikasa had just fallen out of the tree, Armin tipped forward so that he could see the window and hoped his friends were still there and—

            They were. Both Eren and Mikasa were looking straight at him, Eren with his hand still raised to knock on the glass again. What had cut Eren off had not been an unexpected twenty-foot drop, but the surprise of having spotted the person he’d come here to see.

            “C’mere,” Eren said, at a more respectable volume. Armin, still hunched over awkwardly and still with what was starting to feel like a library’s worth of books held against his chest, thought it over. Eren looked as intense and focused as ever, and that was going to be difficult to deal with, much as Armin had wanted to see him. Mikasa’s face next to Eren’s, though, looked different from usual. Admittedly Armin did not know her well; she was quiet when he was around, so they’d never spoken much. Now she was frowning and intent, but somehow more approachable than he’d seen her before. He straightened up as much as he could and stumbled over to the window. “Open it—let us in,” Eren said.

            Probably Armin would have done this, if in opening his mouth to say ‘Alright’ his breath hadn’t caught and his eyes hadn’t started to sting. He hadn’t cried today at all, and he’d thought that was because it was over. But he was going to have to explain, now, if he let Eren and Mikasa inside, and then he was going to cry and Eren wasn’t going to understand and Mikasa was going to be staring at him and—

            Armin pressed his lips together in an attempt to hide that they were wobbling; he shook his head.

            “Wh—why not?” In answer, Armin held up the books as high as he could. Eren stared at them for a long moment, and when he opened his mouth to protest Mikasa elbowed him in the side. He fashioned a petulant fourth-grader scowl, and once he was done directing this at her he turned it on Armin, leaning forward and pressing his nose against the window as if he could physically press his displeasure through the glass.

            It became tempting to draw the curtains, turn off the light, and go to sleep, but there was no guarantee that Eren’s glare would not have burned a hole straight through the fabric. Instead Armin leaned across, resting the weight of the books temporarily on the windowsill, and touched his own nose to the glass. He tried to smile a little to thank Eren and Mikasa for coming to see him, and to apologize that he couldn’t talk to them right now. Eren did not have the social good sense to know not to stare when Armin squeezed his eyes shut and the tears started slipping regardless down his face.

            The standstill was brought to a close when Armin’s grandfather called him for dinner. It gave Armin the opportunity to look over his shoulder, to set down his books, to wipe his face with the sleeve of his sweater while he was turned away. That done, he waved at his friends, smile with a bit more conviction, and then to ran off to eat.

            Eren stayed just where he was for ten full seconds once Armin left the room. Then he leaned back on his and Mikasa’s tree branch and said, “We can’t go in because he’s reading?”

            “We should leave him alone,” Mikasa said.

            “But if he’s just _reading_ —”

            “Because he wants to be alone.”

            “But you wanted people around—”

            “Eren! Armin is Armin, not you or me—so treat him like Armin.”

            “Like Armin…” She nodded. For a moment Eren wavered on the brink, and Mikasa wasn’t sure whether he’d come down on the side of pointless petty anger or actual genuine understanding. “Mikasa, can you help me?”

 

            The next morning, the exchange on the doorstep was much briefer. Armin listened from the kitchen; Eren said “Alright” quickly when told that no, Armin was not going to school, and then he and Mikasa’s footsteps pattered away. There was a pull in Armin’s chest when they faded altogether, but his grandfather had decided that Armin did not look well enough today either. So instead of going to learn about cross multiplication and geography and phonics, Armin rested his cheek on his palm, poked at his increasingly soggy cheerios, and waited. He decided that he could at least be happy he got to miss gym class. They probably had to play dodgeball. He never failed to get hit directly in the face at least once per game, and it seemed that any excuse, any slight watering of his eyes for any reason, could start him going again. The last thing he needed was to give the kids at school another excuse to make fun of him.

 

            The sunlight had turned deep gold, and the shadows outside tapered long. It was the best time of day to be outside, but Armin was occupied with the books he’d piled on his bed. The wall of titles before him was so high that every time he moved, even just to turn a page, he worried it would fall. He was sitting on his bed supporting his chin with both hands as he fought through the preface of some academic tome on concepts he didn’t understand. When Armin did finally look up at the window, he found Eren and Mikasa crowding the pane.

            “Open?”, Eren said, tapping the window lightly with one finger. Armin ran to greet them, and one of the stacks of books toppled with a sad, soft series of thumps. Ph. D-level biology was something Armin didn’t mind fleeing from, and he’d spent most of his day wondering what Eren and Mikasa were studying at school, how they were passing the time at recess, whether they were getting into fights—just generally how things were getting on without him.

            Armin pushed the window open. Just as he was about to greet them, Eren said, “Here,” and pushed a stack of books into his arms.

            “Eren—?”

            “Mikasa has some too.”

            “Um…” Armin looked around quickly, set the books on the floor, and then accepted the second armful. “Eren, what’s going—”

            “We have a test tomorrow,” Eren said.

            “It’s science,” Mikasa said.

            “I copied out my notes for you. So you should come write the test tomorrow. Bye.”

            He turned towards the tree trunk as if to climb down.

            “Wait!”, Armin said. He started forward so suddenly he nearly pitched headfirst out the window. “Where are you going?”

            “Home,” Eren said, looking over his shoulder.

            “I—I—”

            “Mikasa said if that was what was better, that’s what we should do.”

            Mikasa clearly hadn’t made any proscription against staring relentlessly at people who were wrestling in helpless confusion with a dozen wildly different, nearly-irreconcilable emotions, because Eren’s eyes were wide and intent and merciless as ever.

            “Y-you can come in!”

            Saying it decreased the pressure against Armin’s chest slightly, and it put Eren’s grin back in place.

            “Great—”

            In shifting his weight towards the windowsill Eren slipped. Mikasa caught him around his shoulder before he could really start to plummet and tipped him soundly back onto the branch.

            “Maybe use the front door?”, Armin said. “That way we’ll all be in less trouble, probably…”

            “It’s fine, right? Your grandpa likes us.” Eren took hold of the windowsill, and after much fumbling and a moment when his legs were pedalling uselessly at empty air, he tumbled into the room. While Mikasa was rather more artfully climbing through behind him (and Armin did watch, because the possibility that one of his friends might fall to her death was of more concern to him than Eren’s opinion of his bedroom), Eren looked at the books already sitting on his best friend’s bed.

            “Were you making a fort?”

            “Not…really,” Armin said.

            “Because we could help you finish it.”

            “We brought building materials,” Mikasa said as she took the books from Armin and set them on the mattress. Armin’s hands tried to follow the texts—he hadn’t been at a good angle before to see what they were, and he was curious—but they just drifted halfheartedly.

            “But I wasn’t actually…” He sighed as he resigned himself to the situation as it was, but his mouth wasn’t pressed firm to prevent shaking or show displeasure; it was softer at the corners than it had been for days. Eren was already righting the fallen stack, and Mikasa was beginning to lay the groundwork of another wall. “It’ll be easier on the floor. We’ll be less likely to knock if over accidentally.”

            Eren blinked once.

            “Right—right, here, Mikasa, take these ones—”

 

            When Armin’s grandfather called the boy to dinner and there was no response, he wasn’t all that surprised. He’d seen the collection his grandson had started in his room, and knew very well that Armin would read those books until he couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore, whether or not he understood them. If advanced biochemistry was easier for him to understand than the loss, that was for him to determine. Armin’s grandfather had turned to cooking in his grief and confusion; if he could find answers in sautéed vegetables and crackling oil, there was no reason Armin couldn’t in chemical equations and abstract theories.

            That said, and accepting that Armin might (again) manage to stomach only half portions, he really did need to eat. The stairs were not easy on Armin’s grandfather. While he was still wincing and gathering his breath, he rapped his knuckles against the doorframe of Armin’s room.

            “I made s…” Armin’s grandfather paused, then blinked, then squinted. He must have had the radio in the kitchen turned up too loud, because somehow a small architectural project had been undertaken while he was chopping onions. In the walls of this structure, the books Armin’s parents had kept in their room were intermingled with paperback novels and general reference books all bearing the faded black stamp of the local elementary school’s library. The fort had one of Armin’s bed sheets drawn across near the top, held in place by another few layers of books. The canopy did not hide the three mops of hair all resting and tangled together, black, brown, and the more familiar blond.

            The floorboard creaked beneath the old man’s foot. Armin’s brow crumpled for a moment; his head tipped to the left, because that was the side from which all this excess warmth was stemming. He recognized the violently orange sleeve thrown carelessly across him before he recognized the face squashed against its own sloppy science notes. Armin pushed Eren’s arm away from him and was about to sit up when the shape in his peripheral vision made itself unavoidably apparent.

            “Grandpa!” He shot into a sitting position and scrambled around so that he was facing his elder. “I know that you wanted me to keep to myself but Eren and Mikasa brought science notes by for me because we have a test tomorrow and I was helping them study and they brought me books to read and—” His voice was beginning to cycle through octaves as he ran out of air. “—a-and I know I shouldn’t have used mom and dad’s books but I just really wanted to—to understand…”

            Eren and Mikasa were stirring next to him, and his grandfather was just looking at him with an expression Armin couldn’t begin to read through the bushy beard and eyebrows, and he didn’t want to cry now but it seemed so inevitable—

            “I made soup,” his grandfather said. He glanced at Eren and Mikasa. “I made too much soup.”

            Mikasa, who had been rubbing her eyes, realized that there was a conversation going on and sprang into a sitting position much as Armin had. Eren was the last to follow, still blinking sleepily. Armin was staring at them, mainly because it was a simpler thing than staring at the adult in the doorway who he expected to scold him.

            “Armin?” His head swivelled around again with an involuntary squeak. “Do your friends like onions?”

            “Yes,” Eren said.

            “It’s gotten late. You’ve probably missed your own dinner. I made too much soup.” Armin blinked and then the doorway was vacant; he could hear his grandfather making his laboured way down the stairs.

            “We should go, right?”, Eren asked. “It’s better to eat than not. My mom said that when Mikasa first came home.” Armin nodded. While Eren was getting to his feet, Mikasa leaned over towards Armin. It just lasted a moment—it was over so quickly that Armin doubted for a moment whether it had happened. She pulled his sweater more snugly about his shoulders, smoothed down a tuft of hair that was still sticking up after the impromptu nap, and then honestly, genuinely smiled at him. Never before had Armin seen even the faintest trace of an emotion on her face, even when she’d been fighting on the playground. He’d always thought that was amazing, but this was much more so.

            He subdued his bewilderment long enough to climb upright. Without saying a word about it, Eren laced his fingers through Armin’s and tugged him onward, past the room’s threshold. Mikasa was close behind.

_It’s warm_ , Armin thought as they crossed the landing and Eren started in on a fumbling discourse about that day’s science class. Armin brought his free up to his chest and gripped the wool of his sweater where Mikasa had adjusted it. It was there, and it was in the hand folded up with Eren’s, but it didn’t stay contained. This yellow-gold warmth diffused steadily through him, spreading out along his ribs, up along his arm, until it filled him completely. His fingers curled, pressing themselves closer to Eren’s. The other boy was too busy talking about how ignorant rocks were formed in volcanoes to notice.

            “Eren,” Armin said, “you shouldn’t be so mean.” Eren stopped at the first step and looked back with an expression of genuine concern.

            “Mean?”

            “They’re only rocks. They can’t really know any better.” Behind Armin there was a sound like Mikasa was clearing her throat. Eren blinked. “I think it’s igneous, not ignorant.”

            “Oh—yeah, you’re right. See? You’re already doing better than me. This test won’t trip you up at all. You’re going to be fine, Armin.” The steadiness of those eyes was less daunting than it had been. There was faith there, and now Armin felt like he could make it justified.

            He nodded and managed his first genuine, wholehearted smile since his grandfather had first told him.

**Author's Note:**

> I have this preoccupation with Armin's character development and the particular trajectory it's taking, which makes for a lot of very, very lengthy fic ideas. I'm trying to lay the groundwork here for a longer one set several years later, which I may or may not get around to writing depending on how the rest of term plays out.


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